As soon as the door was shut, Sula breathed through her mouth. While Nel was in the room the pain had increased. Now that this new pain killer, the one she had been holding in reserve, was on the way her misery was manageable. She let a piece of her mind lay on Nel. It was funny, sending Nel off to that drugstore right away like that, after she had not seen her to speak to for years. The drugstore was where Edna Finch"s Mellow House used to be years back when they were girls. Where they used to go, the two of them, hand in hand, for the 18-cent ice-cream sundaes, past the Time and a Half Pool Hall, where the sprawling men said "pig meat," and they sat in that cool room with the marble-top tables and ate the first ice-cream sundaes of their lives. Now Nel was going back there alone and Sula was waiting for the medicine the doctor said not to take until the pain got really bad. And she supposed "really bad" was now. Although you could never tell. She wondered for an instant what Nellie wanted; why she had come. Did she want to gloat? Make up? Following this line of thought required more concentration than she could muster. Pain was greedy; it demanded all of her attention. But it was good that this new medicine, the reserve, would be brought to her by her old friend. Nel, she remembered, always thrived on a crisis. The closed place in the water; Hannah"s funeral. Nel was the best. When Sula imitated her, or tried to, those long years ago, it always ended up in some action noteworthy not for its coolness but mostly for its being bizarre. The one time she tried to protect Nel, she had cut off her own finger tip and earned not Nel"s grat.i.tude but her disgust. From then on she had let her emotions dictate her behavior.
She could hear Nel"s footsteps long before she opened the door and put the medicine on the table near the bed.
As Sula poured the liquid into a sticky spoon, Nel began the sickroom conversation.
"You look fine, Sula."
"You lying, Nellie. I look bad." She gulped the medicine.
"No. I haven"t seen you for a long time, but you look..."
"You don"t have to do that, Nellie. It"s going to be all right."
"What ails you? Have they said?"
Sula licked the corners of her lips. "You want to talk about that?"
Nel smiled, slightly, at the bluntness she had forgotten. "No. No, I don"t, but you sure you should be staying up here alone?"
"Nathan comes by. The deweys sometimes, and Tar Baby..."
"That ain"t help, Sula. You need to be with somebody grown. Somebody who can..."
"I"d rather be here, Nellie."
"You know you don"t have to be proud with me."
"Proud?" Sula"s laughter broke through the phlegm. "What you talking about? I like my own dirt, Nellie. I"m not proud. You sure have forgotten me."
"Maybe. Maybe not. But you a woman and you alone."
"And you? Ain"t you alone?"
"I"m not sick. I work."
"Yes. Of course you do. Work"s good for you, Nellie. It don"t do nothing for me."
"You never had had to." to."
"I never would."
"There"s something to say for it, Sula. "Specially if you don"t want people to have to do for you."
"Neither one, Nellie. Neither one."
"You can"t have it all, Sula." Nel was getting exasperated with her arrogance, with her lying at death"s door still smart-talking.
"Why? I can do it all, why can"t I have it all?"
"You can"t can"t do it all. You a woman and a colored woman at that. You can"t act like a man. You can"t be walking around all independent-like, doing whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don"t." do it all. You a woman and a colored woman at that. You can"t act like a man. You can"t be walking around all independent-like, doing whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don"t."
"You repeating yourself."
"How repeating myself?"
"You say I"m a woman and colored. Ain"t that the same as being a man?"
"I don"t think so and you wouldn"t either if you had children."
"Then I really would act like what you call a man. Every man I ever knew left his children."
"Some were taken."
"Wrong, Nellie. The word is "left.""
"You still going to know everything, ain"t you?"
"I don"t know everything, I just do everything."
"Well, you don"t do what I do."
"You think I don"t know what your life is like just because I ain"t living it? I know what every colored woman in this country is doing."
"What"s that?"
"Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I"m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world."
"Really? What have you got to show for it?"
"Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me."
"Lonely, ain"t it?"
"Yes. But my lonely is mine. mine. Now your lonely is somebody else"s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain"t that something? A secondhand lonely." Now your lonely is somebody else"s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain"t that something? A secondhand lonely."
Nel sat back on the little wooden chair. Anger skipped but she realized that Sula was probably just showing off. No telling what shape she was really in, but there was no point in saying anything other than what was the truth. "I always understood how you could take a man. Now I understand why you can"t keep none."
"Is that what I"m supposed to do? Spend my life keeping a man?"
"They worth keeping, Sula."
"They ain"t worth more than me. And besides, I never loved no man because he was worth it. Worth didn"t have nothing to do with it."
"What did?"
"My mind did. That"s all."
"Well I guess that"s it. You own the world and the rest of us is renting. You ride the pony and we shovel the s.h.i.t. I didn"t come up here for this kind of talk, Sula..."
"No?"
"No. I come to see about you. But now that you opened it up, I may as well close it." Nel"s fingers closed around the bra.s.s rail of the bed. Now she would ask her. "How come you did it, Sula?"
There was a silence but Nel felt no obligation to fill it.
Sula stirred a little under the covers. She looked bored as she sucked her teeth. "Well, there was this s.p.a.ce in front of me, behind me, in my head. Some s.p.a.ce. And Jude filled it up. That"s all. He just filled up the s.p.a.ce."
"You mean you didn"t even love him?" The feel of the bra.s.s was in Nel"s mouth. "It wasn"t even loving him?"
Sula looked toward the boarded-up window again. Her eyes fluttered as if she were about to fall off into sleep.
"But..." Nel held her stomach in. "But what about me? What about me? Why didn"t you think about me? Didn"t I count? I never hurt you. What did you take him for if you didn"t love him and why didn"t you think about me?" And then, "I was good to you, Sula, why don"t that matter?"
Sula turned her head away from the boarded window. Her voice was quiet and the stemmed rose over her eye was very dark. "It matters, Nel, but only to you. Not to anybody else. Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don"t get nothing for it."
Nel took her hands from the bra.s.s railing. She was annoyed with herself. Finally when she had gotten the nerve to ask the question, the right question, it made no difference. Sula couldn"t give her a sensible answer because she didn"t know. Would be, in fact, the last to know. Talking to her about right and wrong was like talking to the deweys. She picked at the fringe on Sula"s bedspread and said softly, "We were friends."
"Oh, yes. Good friends," Sula said.
"And you didn"t love me enough to leave him alone. To let him love me. You had to take him away."
"What you mean take him away? I didn"t kill him, I just f.u.c.ked him. If we were such good friends, how come you couldn"t get over it?"
"You laying there in that bed without a dime or a friend to your name having done all the dirt you did in this town and you still expect folks to love you?"
Sula raised herself up on her elbows. Her face glistened with the dew of fever. She opened her mouth as though to say something, then fell back on the pillows and sighed. "Oh, they"ll love me all right. It will take time, but they"ll love me." The sound of her voice was as soft and distant as the look in her eyes. "After all the old women have lain with the teen-agers; when all the young girls have slept with their old drunken uncles; after all the black men f.u.c.k all the white ones; when all the white women kiss all the black ones; when the guards have raped all the jailbirds and after all the wh.o.r.es make love to their grannies; after all the f.a.ggots get their mothers" trim; when Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith and Norma Shearer makes it with Stepin Fetchit; after all the dogs have f.u.c.ked all the cats and every weathervane on every barn flies off the roof to mount the hogs...then there"ll be a little love left over for me. And I know just what it will feel like."
She closed her eyes then and thought of the wind pressing her dress between her legs as she ran up the bank of the river to four leaf-locked trees and the digging of holes in the earth.
Embarra.s.sed, irritable and a little bit ashamed, Nel rose to go. "Goodbye, Sula. I don"t reckon I"ll be back."
She opened the door and heard Sula"s low whisper. "Hey, girl." Nel paused and turned her head but not enough to see her.
"How you know?" Sula asked.
"Know what?" Nel still wouldn"t look at her.
"About who was good. How you know it was you?"
"What you mean?"
"I mean maybe it wasn"t you. Maybe it was me."
Nel took two steps out the door and closed it behind her. She walked down the hall and down the four flights of steps. The house billowed around her light then dark, full of presences without sounds. The deweys, Tar Baby, the newly married couples, Mr. Buckland Reed, Patsy, Valentine, and the beautiful Hannah Peace. Where were they? Eva out at the old folks" home, the deweys living anywhere, Tar Baby steeped in wine, and Sula upstairs in Eva"s bed with a boarded-up window and an empty pocketbook on the dresser.When Nel closed the door, Sula reached for more medicine. Then she turned the pillow over to its cool side and thought about her old friend. "So she will walk on down that road, her back so straight in that old green coat, the strap of her handbag pushed back all the way to the elbow, thinking how much I have cost her and never remember the days when we were two throats and one eye and we had no price."
Pictures drifted through her head as lightly as dandelion spores: the blue eagle that swallowed the E of the Sherman"s Mellowe wine that Tar Baby drank; the pink underlid of Hannah"s eye as she probed for a fleck of coal dust or a lash. She thought of looking out of the windows of all those trains and buses, looking at the feet and backs of all those people. Nothing was ever different. They were all the same. All of the words and all of the smiles, every tear and every gag just something to do.
"That"s the same sun I looked at when I was twelve, the same pear trees. If I live a hundred years my urine will flow the same way, my armpits and breath will smell the same. My hair will grow from the same holes. I didn"t mean anything. I never meant anything. I stood there watching her burn and was thrilled. I wanted her to keep on jerking like that, to keep on dancing."
Then she had the dream again. The Clabber Girl Baking Powder lady was smiling and beckoning to her, one hand under her ap.r.o.n. When Sula came near she disintegrated into white dust, which Sula was hurriedly trying to stuff into the pockets of her blue-flannel housecoat. The disintegration was awful to see, but worse was the feel of the powder-its starchy slipperiness as she tried to collect it by handfuls. The more she scooped, the more it billowed. At last it covered her, filled her eyes, her nose, her throat, and she woke gagging and overwhelmed with the smell of smoke.
Pain took hold. First a fluttering as of doves in her stomach, then a kind of burning, followed by a spread of thin wires to other parts of her body. Once the wires of liquid pain were in place, they jelled and began to throb. She tried concentrating on the throbs, identifying them as waves, hammer strokes, razor edges or small explosions. Soon even the variety of the pain bored her and there was nothing to do, for it was joined by fatigue so great she could not make a fist or fight the taste of oil at the back of her tongue.
Several times she tried to cry out, but the fatigue barely let her open her lips, let alone take the deep breath necessary to scream. So she lay there wondering how soon she would gather enough strength to lift her arm and push the rough quilt away from her chin and whether she should turn her cheek to the cooler side of the pillow now or wait till her face was thoroughly soaked and the move would be more refreshing. But she was reluctant to move her face for another reason. If she turned her head, she would not be able to see the boarded-up window Eva jumped out of. And looking at those four wooden planks with the steel rod slanting across them was the only peace she had. The sealed window soothed her with its st.u.r.dy termination, its una.s.sailable finality. It was as though for the first time she was completely alone-where she had always wanted to be-free of the possibility of distraction. It would be here, only here, held by this blind window high above the elm tree, that she might draw her legs up to her chest, close her eyes, put her thumb in her mouth and float over and down the tunnels, just missing the dark walls, down, down until she met a rain scent and would know the water was near, and she would curl into its heavy softness and it would envelop her, carry her, and wash her tired flesh always. Always. Who said that? She tried hard to think. Who was it that had promised her a sleep of water always? The effort to recall was too great; it loosened a knot in her chest that turned her thoughts again to the pain.
While in this state of weary antic.i.p.ation, she noticed that she was not breathing, that her heart had stopped completely. A crease of fear touched her breast, for any second there was sure to be a violent explosion in her brain, a gasping for breath. Then she realized, or rather she sensed, that there was not going to be any pain. She was not breathing because she didn"t have to. Her body did not need oxygen. She was dead.
Sula felt her face smiling. "Well, I"ll be d.a.m.ned," she thought, "it didn"t even hurt. Wait"ll I tell Nel."
1941.
The death of Sula Peace was the best news folks up in the Bottom had had since the promise of work at the tunnel. Of the few who were not afraid to witness the burial of a witch and who had gone to the cemetery, some had come just to verify her being put away but stayed to sing "Shall We Gather at the River" for politeness" sake, quite unaware of the bleak promise of their song. Others came to see that nothing went awry, that the shallow-minded and small-hearted kept their meanness at bay, and that the entire event be characterized by that abiding gentleness of spirit to which they themselves had arrived by the simple determination not to let anything-anything at all: not failed crops, not rednecks, lost jobs, sick children, rotten potatoes, broken pipes, bug-ridden flour, third-cla.s.s coal, educated social workers, thieving insurance men, garlic-ridden hunkies, corrupt Catholics, racist Protestants, cowardly Jews, slaveholding Moslems, jackleg n.i.g.g.e.r preachers, squeamish Chinamen, cholera, dropsy or the Black Plague, let alone a strange woman-keep them from their G.o.d.
In any case, both the raw-spirited and the gentle who came-not to the white funeral parlor but to the colored part of the Beechnut Cemetery-felt that either because because Sula was dead or just Sula was dead or just after after she was dead a brighter day was dawning. There were signs. The rumor that the tunnel spanning the river would use Negro workers became an announcement. Planned, abandoned and replanned for years, this project had finally begun in 1937. For three years there were rumors that blacks would work it, and hope was high in spite of the fact that the River Road leading to the tunnel had encouraged similar hopes in 1927 but had ended up being built entirely by white labor-hillbillies and immigrants taking even the lowest jobs. But the tunnel itself was another matter. The craft work-no, they would not get that. But it was a major job, and the government seemed to favor opening up employment to black workers. It meant black men would not have to sweep Medallion to eat, or leave the town altogether for the steel mills in Akron and along Lake Erie. she was dead a brighter day was dawning. There were signs. The rumor that the tunnel spanning the river would use Negro workers became an announcement. Planned, abandoned and replanned for years, this project had finally begun in 1937. For three years there were rumors that blacks would work it, and hope was high in spite of the fact that the River Road leading to the tunnel had encouraged similar hopes in 1927 but had ended up being built entirely by white labor-hillbillies and immigrants taking even the lowest jobs. But the tunnel itself was another matter. The craft work-no, they would not get that. But it was a major job, and the government seemed to favor opening up employment to black workers. It meant black men would not have to sweep Medallion to eat, or leave the town altogether for the steel mills in Akron and along Lake Erie.
The second sign was the construction begun on an old people"s home. True, it was more renovation than construction, but the blacks were free, or so it was said, to occupy it. Some said that the very transfer of Eva from the ramshackle house that pa.s.sed for a colored women"s nursing home to the bright new one was a clear sign of the mystery of G.o.d"s ways, His mighty thumb having been seen at Sula"s throat.
So it was with a strong sense of hope that the people in the Bottom watched October close.
Then Medallion turned silver. It seemed sudden, but actually there had been days and days of no snow-just frost-when, late one afternoon, a rain fell and froze. Way down Carpenter"s Road, where the concrete sidewalks started, children hurried to the sliding places before shopkeepers and old women sprinkled stove ashes, like ancient onyx, onto the new-minted silver. They hugged trees simply to hold for a moment all that life and largeness stilled in gla.s.s, and gazed at the sun pressed against the gray sky like a worn doubloon, wondering all the while if the world were coming to an end. Gra.s.s stood blade by blade, shocked into separateness by an ice that held for days.
Late-harvesting things were ruined, of course, and fowl died of both chill and rage. Cider turned to ice and split the jugs, forcing the men to drink their cane liquor too soon. It was better down in the valley, since, as always, the hills protected it, but up in the Bottom black folks suffered heavily in their thin houses and thinner clothes. The ice-cold wind bled what little heat they had through windowpanes and ill-fitting doors. For days on end they were virtually housebound, venturing out only to coal bins or right next door for the trading of vital foodstuffs. Never to the stores. No deliveries were being made anyway, and when they were, the items were saved for better-paying white customers. Women could not make it down the icy slopes and therefore missed days of wages they sorely needed.
The consequence of all that ice was a wretched Thanksgiving of tiny tough birds, heavy pork cakes, and pithy sweet potatoes. By the time the ice began to melt and the first barge was seen shuddering through the ice skim on the river, everybody under fifteen had croup, or scarlet fever, and those over had chilblains, rheumatism, pleurisy, earaches and a world of other ailments.
Still it was not those illnesses or even the ice that marked the beginning of the trouble, that self-fulfilled prophecy that Shadrack carried on his tongue. As soon as the silvering began, long before the cider cracked the jugs, there was something wrong. A falling away, a dislocation was taking place. Hard on the heels of the general relief that Sula"s death brought a restless irritability took hold. Teapot, for example, went into the kitchen and asked his mother for some sugar-b.u.t.ter-bread. She got up to fix it and found that she had no b.u.t.ter, only oleomargarine. Too tired to mix the saffron-colored powder into the hard cake of oleo, she simply smeared the white stuff on the bread and sprinkled the sugar over it. Teapot tasted the difference and refused to eat it. This keenest of insults that a mother can feel, the rejection by a child of her food, bent her into fury and she beat him as she had not done since Sula knocked him down the steps. She was not alone. Other mothers who had defended their children from Sula"s malevolence (or who had defended their positions as mothers from Sula"s scorn for the role) now had nothing to rub up against. The tension was gone and so was the reason for the effort they had made. Without her mockery, affection for others sank into flaccid disrepair. Daughters who had complained bitterly about the responsibilities of taking care of their aged mothers-in-law had altered when Sula locked Eva away, and they began cleaning those old women"s spittoons without a murmur. Now that Sula was dead and done with, they returned to a steeping resentment of the burdens of old people. Wives uncoddled their husbands; there seemed no further need to reinforce their vanity. And even those Negroes who had moved down from Canada to Medallion, who remarked every chance they got that they had never been slaves, felt a loosening of the reactionary compa.s.sion for Southern-born blacks Sula had inspired in them. They returned to their original claims of superiority.
The normal meanness that the winter brought was compounded by the small-spiritedness that hunger and scarlet fever produced. Even a definite and witnessed interview of four colored men (and the promise of more in the spring) at the tunnel site could not break the cold vise of that lean and bitter year"s end.
Christmas came one morning and haggled everybody"s nerves like a dull ax-too shabby to cut clean but too heavy to ignore. The children lay wall-eyed on creaking beds or pallets near the stove, sucking peppermint and oranges in between coughs while their mothers stomped the floors in rage at the cakes that did not rise because the stove fire had been so stingy; at the curled bodies of men who chose to sleep the day away rather than face the silence made by the absence of Lionel trains, drums, crybaby dolls and rocking horses. Teen-agers sneaked into the Elmira Theater in the afternoon and let Tex Ritter free them from the recollection of their fathers" shoes, yawning in impotence under the bed. Some of them had a bottle of wine, which they drank at the feet of the glittering Mr. Ritter, making such a ruckus the manager had to put them out. The white people who came with Christmas bags of rock candy and old clothes were hard put to get a Yes"m, thank you, Yes"m, thank you, out of those sullen mouths. out of those sullen mouths.
Just as the ice lingered in October, so did the phlegm of December-which explained the enormous relief brought on by the first three days of 1941. It was as though the season had exhausted itself, for on January first the temperature shot up to sixty-one degrees and slushed the whiteness overnight. On January second drab patches of gra.s.s could be seen in the fields. On January third the sun came out-and so did Shadrack with his rope, his bell and his childish dirge.
He had spent the night before watching a tiny moon. The people, the voices that kept him company, were with him less and less. Now there were long periods when he heard nothing except the wind in the trees and the plop of buckeyes on the earth. In the winter, when the fish were too hard to get to, he did picking-up jobs for small businessmen (n.o.body would have him in or even near their homes), and thereby continued to have enough money for liquor. Yet the drunk times were becoming deeper but more seldom. It was as though he no longer needed to drink to forget whatever it was he could not remember. Now he could not remember that he had ever forgotten anything. Perhaps that was why for the first time after that cold day in France he was beginning to miss the presence of other people. Shadrack had improved enough to feel lonely. If he was lonely before, he didn"t know it because the noise he kept up, the roaring, the busyness, protected him from knowing it. Now the compulsion to activity, to filling up the time when he was not happily fishing on the riverbank, had dwindled. He sometimes fell asleep before he got drunk; sometimes spent whole days looking at the river and the sky; and more and more he relinquished the military habits of cleanliness in his shack. Once a bird flew into his door-one of the robins during the time there was a plague of them. It stayed, looking for an exit, for the better part of an hour. When the bird found the window and flew away, Shadrack was grieved and actually waited and watched for its return. During those days of waiting, he did not make his bed, or sweep, or shake out the little rag-braid rug, and almost forgot to slash with his fish knife the pa.s.sing day on his calendar. When he did return to housekeeping, it was not with the precision he had always insisted upon. The messier his house got, the lonelier he felt, and it was harder and harder to conjure up sergeants, and orderlies, and invading armies; harder and harder to hear the gunfire and keep the platoon marching in time. More frequently now he looked at and fondled the one piece of evidence that he once had a visitor in his house: a child"s purple-and-white belt. The one the little girl left behind when she came to see him. Shadrack remembered the scene clearly. He had stepped into the door and there was a tear-stained face turning, turning toward him; eyes hurt and wondering; mouth parted in an effort to ask a question. She had wanted something-from him. Not fish, not work, but something only he could give. She had a tadpole over her eye (that was how he knew she was a friend-she had the mark of the fish he loved), and one of her braids had come undone. But when he looked at her face he had seen also the skull beneath, and thinking she saw it too-knew it was there and was afraid-he tried to think of something to say to comfort her, something to stop the hurt from spilling out of her eyes. So he had said "always," so she would not have to be afraid of the change-the falling away of skin, the drip and slide of blood, and the exposure of bone underneath. He had said "always" to convince her, a.s.sure her, of permanency.
It worked, for when he said it her face lit up and the hurt did leave. She ran then, carrying his knowledge, but her belt fell off and he kept it as a memento. It hung on a nail near his bed-unfrayed, unsullied after all those years, with only the permanent bend in the fabric made by its long life on a nail. It was pleasant living with that sign of a visitor, his only one. And after a while he was able to connect the belt with the face, the tadpole-over-the-eye-face that he sometimes saw up in the Bottom. His visitor, his company, his guest, his social life, his woman, his daughter, his friend-they all hung there on a nail near his bed.
Now he stared at the tiny moon floating high over the ice-choked river. His loneliness had dropped down somewhere around his ankles. Some other feeling possessed him. A feeling that touched his eyes and made him blink. He had seen her again months? weeks? ago. Raking leaves for Mr. Hodges, he had gone into the cellar for two bushel baskets to put them in. In the hallway he pa.s.sed an open door leading to a small room. She lay on a table there. It was surely the same one. The same little-girl face, same tadpole over the eye. So he had been wrong. Terribly wrong. No "always" at all. Another dying away of someone whose face he knew.
It was then he began to suspect that all those years of rope hauling and bell ringing were never going to do any good. He might as well sit forever on his riverbank and stare out of the window at the moon.
By his day-slashed calendar he knew that tomorrow was the day. And for the first time he did not want to go. He wanted to stay with the purple-and-white belt. Not go. Not go.